For text based searching in the "All text", or "Title" fields,
I often 
want certain keywords and not an exact phrase
search. E.G. I 
would like to type "eth0 jabber" in a Title
field and find all topics 
that have the words "eth0" and the
word "jabber" in the title 
regardless of their relative
positions in the title. Right now it 
seems phrase searching
is the only thing that is 
possible.

I would suggest splitting the search phrase into 
quoted
(phrase search) and unquoted portions and 
then
reporting the intersection of the results for each 
search.

E.G.

  "sun microsystems" sunblade disk 
failure

would be implemented as:

  search for the 
phrase "sun microsystems"
  search for the phrase 
"sunblade"

set the result set to the intersection of these 
two
search results.

  search for the phrase 
"disk"

set the result set to the intersection of the current 
result
set and the results of this search. Same with the phrase 
"failure".

-- rouilj